Page 172 of Slashed Bonds

It’s a performance.

A deliberate, devastating finale.

They break apart panting, foreheads pressed together, staring as if seeing each other for the first time through the haze of spent lust.

I have no words for what we’ve just done. But one truth echoes through the wreckage of my mind.

We are ruined for anything else…cause no one else could ever come close.

* * *

The lockers are cold after the water.

I come out first.

Barefoot on tile, wet to the waist with my hair dragged forward over my shoulders and lying along the front of me because there’s nothing else to lie there, no towel on any hook, no robe on the bench, this being a room built for one woman who was never meant to arrive.

And Cassian is sitting on the bench.

Casual.

That’s the word he’d want, and it’s the right one. One ankle on the opposite knee, back against the lockers, an iPad propped on his thigh, in a gray hoodie with the hood down and his glasses on, which means he’s been here long enough to stop pretending he doesn’t need them.

He looks up when my feet hit the tile.

Confirms it’s me. That’s the whole of the look.

The way a man checks a face at a door he knew would open, and his eyes meet mine, and he keeps them there for a full second before he lets them go anywhere else.

He’s trying not to smirk. He’s losing.

It’s at the corner of his mouth.

The appreciation.

He’s got the control of a captain, and the eyes of a man who’s walked in on a naked woman he’s been thinking about, and the eyes win, and they go down me in one slow pass, my hair over my nipples, water running off the ink on my arms and the ink on my neck and the scars under both, down my hips to the floor, and back up.

I don’t cover anything.

For anyone else I’d have gone for a towel I knew wasn’t there, but for my Captain? I want him looking just at me…

He puts the iPad on the bench beside him. Screen up.

Face down, I’d expect, from a man who guards the whiteboard in his room with a closed door. He doesn’t. He leaves it up, and from here I can see a rink diagram with four colors of marker on it and my number in the slot.

Then he pats his lap.

“Come here, Malice.” Low. Unhurried. “Let’s get you dried up.”

I smirk and sauté to him

And I don’t hesitate, which I notice, forcing me to realize how much easier it’s getting to be with these men without second-guessing.

Dangerous to acknowledge…yet empowering to embrace.

Three for three.

Across the tile with my feet leaving prints, and I sit on his thigh with my wet hair dripping onto his hoodie, and he reaches behind the bench and comes up with a towel.